1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to voltage supplies, particularly supplies of high voltage.
2. Background Information
High voltages, in excess of 100 kV, are sometimes used in manufacturing. A manufacturing structure may include dedicated power supplies for maintaining component modules at a high relative AC or DC potential.
One conventional approach to generating high DC voltages uses a Cockcroft-Walton (“CW”) voltage multiplier. A CW voltage multiplier is an arrangement of diodes and capacitors that rectifies an AC input voltage by charging the capacitors in parallel and discharging them in series. The diodes and capacitors are arranged in stages, each of which augments the DC output voltage by one increment equal to the peak AC input voltage value. Although in principle any arbitrarily high voltage requirement can be satisfied with a CW multiplier having a sufficient number of stages, in practice as the number of stages increases, the multiplier suffers from reduced power efficiency and has limited usefulness for high-power applications.
There is accordingly a need for a voltage supply capable of generating voltages on the order of several hundred kilovolts while delivering currents on the order of tens of milliamps.